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The Works of Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, E The Criterion www.the-criterion.com An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 Vol. III. Issue. IV 1 December 2012 The Criterion www.the-criterion.com An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 Bridges to Breakthroughs: Tracing the Genealogy of the Indian Science Fiction and Fantasy Genre in English Shradha Kabra Established genres of the West are constantly being modified, adapted and evolved for the consumption of other nations. Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) is one such genre that enjoys unsurpassed popularity prominently because it is a cross-over genre which fuses the impulses and techniques of both science fiction (Sf) and fantasy. Over the years, it has caught the interest of Indian writers in English and the international market is increasingly being proliferated by works of Indian. The paper would trace the watershed moments in the history of Indian Science Fiction (Sf) and fantasy, which are the parent genres of SFF that gradually gave rise to this “bastard” genre, to assimilate their value in the Indian-English literary tradition. Sf and Fantasy in English are considered to be a nascent genre in India although works featuring fantastical elements in India dates back to classical antiquity. The works of some of the prominent Indian fantasy writers have been traced in the paper to provide a rough idea about how the SFF genre evolved in India especially in English. For doing so, I have looked at some important signposts in Bengali Sf and Fantasy as many renowned Indian Sf writers chose Bengali as their language of narration than English. Only after the reading population embraced Sf and fantasy did SFF finally emerge in India with the Gameworld trilogy of Samit Basu, who claims to be the first Indian SFF writer in English (samitbasu.com). Brian Attebery, an academic writer of science fiction (sf) and fantasy, seeks to ascertain the reason behind the popularity of Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) in “Science Fantasy and Myth” published in Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction (1987). He states that one of the answers to its popularity among writers and readers may be found in Maud Bodkin’s classic Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination, (1934) which posited the fact that human beings seem to observe the world simultaneously from two perspectives, one emotional and the other rational. Bodkin writes: The belief that fire burns us, that water drowns and cleanses, and will quench our thirst, that earth yields crops for food, and sustains our dwellings, and will hide our bodies at the last, have all a twofold aspect, emotional as well as intellectual. We can extend their content by abstract but sensibly verifiable relations till they make up a large part of our scientific knowledge. Or we can transform them into poetry by using them to satisfy our need for emotional expression; as when, with Prometheus, we call upon Earth, the mighty mother, or, with St. Francis, praise God for the many services of Sister Water. In these instances the very intimacy and range of our practical knowledge of earth and water adds power to the ideas as instruments of emotional expression. (Emphasis added, p. 11). Thus, Bodkin’s idea, about two perspectives of viewing the world, readily gets transposed to our field of discussion. Sf presents its assumptions within the framework of scientific theories. “Fantasy, like poetry, is more concerned with archetype and emotion,” (Attebery, “Science Fantasy and Myth”). SFF is a hybrid literary form that combines the features of science fiction (Sf) and fantasy, which embody the two perspectives of Bodkin’s, namely the intellectual and the emotional. These three literary forms; SFF, Sf and fantasy; fall under Speculative Fiction which is an inclusive, umbrella term Vol. III. Issue. IV 2 December 2012 The Criterion www.the-criterion.com An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 encompassing writings ranging from hard science fiction, epic fantasy, horror, magic realism, slipstream to modern myth-making. The term “speculative fiction,” like most genre names such as Sf or SFF, does not have a universally agreed upon definition. The term appears to have been coined1 by Robert A. Heinlein, a popular American Sf writer who first used the term in The Saturday Evening Post (1947). In an essay entitled “On Writing Speculative Fiction” in 1948, Heinlein used the term speculative fiction as a substitute for Sf. But once the term became popular, editors, critics, readers and academics gradually appropriated it for their own use and later writers developed the tendency to think of speculative fiction as a broad genre covering everything from Sf and fantasy to horror. In short, any work that was not “realistic” in nature fell under the category of speculative fiction. Tabish Khair in “Indian Pulp Fiction in English: A Preliminary Overview from Dutt to Dé” writes that Indian English Science Fiction began “with the publication of K.C. Dutt’s A Journal of Forty Eight Hours of the Year 1945 in the Calcutta Literary Gazette in June 1835. This was largely a work of historical fantasy, in which the author described a war of independence, led by a charismatic leader, which Indians would fight against the British at a time about a century in the future” (published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature). Another early Indian English text that owes its affinity to Sf is Soshee Chunder’s The Republic of Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the 20th Century (1845), “narrates the bid, in 1916, of the people of the state of Orissa to break away from the British Empire” (Khair, “Indian Pulp Fiction in English: A Preliminary Overview from Dutt to Dé”). Khair identifies another similar text, the short story “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Suchitra Mathur cites the story’s relevance as being a Sf inscribed in the Indian context by asserting, “the label of science fiction, however, could be applied with equal justification [to such texts] not only because of their futuristic utopian/dystopian setting, but more importantly, because of the implicit critique of modern science that informs their more overt engagement with issues of gender and class respectively” (“Caught between the Goddess and the Cyborg: Third- World Women and the Politics of Science in Three Works of Indian Science Fiction”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature). The earlier works in English by Dutt, Chunder and Hossain depict elements of Sf but fail to qualify as Sfs. Arshad Said Khan writes in an article entitled “Udankhatola Redux” in Tehelka Magazine on December 08, 2007 that modern Indian Sf was born in Bengal in the nineteenth century with the short story “Shukra Bhraman” or “Travels to Venus”, by Jagananda Roy in 1879. The colonized Bengali was seen to be in awe of western science and technology and as a corollary soon became fascinated by the genre of science fiction. Debjani Sengupta2 in her essay “Sadhanbabu’s Friends: Science Fiction in Bengal from 1882 to 1974” in the book Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World writes that “for the urban elite of Calcutta, science stories were a kind of myth formation of the new industrial age. Science was perceived as essentially “Western, an attribute of 1 Although the term “speculative fiction” was coined by Robert Heinlein as a substitute for Sf but there are earlier citations of this term, such as, a piece in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1889, used the term in reference to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887 (1887). 2 Debjani Sengupta teaches at the Department of English, Indraprastha College, University of Delhi. Vol. III. Issue. IV 3 December 2012 The Criterion www.the-criterion.com An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 European civilization” (p.115). This genre accommodated Western science fiction genre into an Indian world-view. The first science fiction novella in Bengali was Hemlal Dutta’s “Rahashya” (“The Mystery”) which was published in two installments in 1882 in the pictorial Bigyan Darpan magazine. The story reflected an understanding for the rationalism of science which, according to Isaac Asimov, is a marker of good science fiction. Premendra Mitra was one of Bengal’s most famous practitioners of science fiction. Two of his most famous stories are “Piprey Puran” (“The Annals of the Ants”) and “Mangalbari” (“The Martian Enemies”). From his stories Mitra spells out his purpose clearly. He critiques human life and aspirations and asserts that to survive, human beings must forget their differences and be united. Satyajit Ray created the legendary figure of Professor Shonku in 1961. The first Sf featuring this eccentric character was written for the magazine Sandesh and was titled “Byomjatrir Diary” (“The Diary of the Space Traveler”). In all, thirty-eight complete and two incomplete diaries (the last one was published in 1992) narrate the incredible world of Shonku’s travels and inventions. Most of these stories are more than science fiction. They are also travelogues, fantasy tales, tales of adventure and romance. As a fictional character Professor Shonku is tremendously real. He is courageous yet forgetful, inquisitive yet self-controlled. His wit and humour makes him very human and his inventions are impressive: Anhihiline, Miracural, Omniscope, Snuffgun, Mangorange, Camperapid, Linguagraph – the list is long and remarkable. Some are drugs, some gadgets, some machines, but they all have human purposes and uses. None are allowed to reign over or be more powerful than the human mind that invented them. (“Sadhanbabu’s Friends: Science Fiction in Bengal from 1882 to 1974”, Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World, p. 122) In recent years too, Indian writers in English have written powerful texts in this tradition. Manjula Padmanabhan’s “Harvest” (1995), Vandana Singh’s “Delhi” (2004) and Anil Menon’s the Beast with Nine Billion Feet (2009) are some of the texts that belong to the genre.
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